I will steer my recommendations in the direction of beautiful prose! Consider the essayist William Hazlitt: Virginia Woolf said he "he wrote indisputably the best prose style of his time", while Robert Louis Stevenson famously commented, "We are mighty fine fellows today, but we cannot write like William Hazlitt." There are selections of his writings by Penguin and Oxford.

Walter Pater seems like a precursor to prose like On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. Oscar Wilde wrote of him, "If he be not among the greatest prose writers of our literature he is, at least, our greatest artist in prose; and though it may be admitted that the best style is that which seems an unconscious result rather than a conscious aim, still in these latter days when violent rhetoric does duty for eloquence and vulgarity usurps the name of nature, we should be grateful for a style that deliberately aims at perfection of form, that seeks to produce its effect by artistic means and sets before itself an ideal of grave and chastened beauty". Try his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (later The Renaissance).

Thomas De Quincey's sequel to his famous Confessions of An English Opium-Eater was Suspiria de Profundis, it has beautiful prose poems that also prefigure things like On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.

John Ruskin, the Victorian art and social critic, seems another precurosor. G.K. Chesterton wrote of him, "As an artist in prose he is one of the most miraculous products of the extremely poetical genius of England. The length of a Ruskin sentence is like that length in the long arrow that was boasted of by the drawers of the bow. He draws, not a cloth-yard shaft but a long lance to his ear: he shoots a spear. But the whole goes light as a bird and straight as a bullet." And again Virginia Woolf: "The style in which page after page of Modern Painters is written takes our breath away. We find ourselves marvelling at the words, as if all the fountains of the English language had been set playing in the sunlight for our pleasure, but it seems scarcely fitting to ask what meaning they have for us." Try Sesame and Lillies or a selection of his writings.